Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place. By Coll Thrush. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007. xxii, 326 pp. $28.95, ISBN 978-0-295-98700-2.)

Abstract

In his important new book Native Seattle, Coll Thrush challenges the idea that “Indian and urban histories are somehow mutually exclusive” (p. 13). Thrush asserts that Indians were present in the place that became Seattle before, during, and after its founding, and argues that they were integral to both the building and imagining of the city. Bringing together the fields of Native, urban, and environmental history, Thrush structures his book around place-stories—grounded narratives that people use to explain who they are. He traces how urban growth and its attendant environmental change disrupted “landscapes that were dense with meaning” for local indigenous peoples (p. 21). (Thrush uses one especially innovative method to do this—an atlas of Native Seattle that catalogs the names, uses, and stories of the indigenous landscape on which the city was built.) Meanwhile, white settlers created their own place-stories for their new home by co-opting such Native imagery as totem poles, potlatches, and Chief Seattle.